Derek Powazek
Biography
Working the web since 1995, Derek Powazek is an
award-winning web designer, community consultant, and UI wonk. Derek is the
author of “Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual
Places” (designforcommunity.com) which is a web design book for social
software. Derek currently works as the Senior Designer for Technorati, where he’s
working to make the world of weblogs accessible to a broader audience. He lives
in San Francisco with his wife, two nutty Chihuahuas, a grumpy cat, and a house
full of plants named Fred. Visit Derek online at
http://www.powazek.com.
Position Paper
Community on the web has always been a top-down affair—to
chat on AOL, you need to be an AOL member. This led to a loose affiliation of large
fiefdoms, each with its own name and password.
While this might be good for the gatekeepers, who live for
the click of credit card numbers into sign-up forms, it runs against the grain
of the web, where hypertext was designed to let the user freely jump from place
to place.
Weblogs are changing all that. Instead of defining a
community by URL (get a Whatever.com membership and you’re officially part of
the Whatever community), communities are finding their identities outside of
any central hub. This is a more authentic, holistic way to enable communities
to form.
But what happens to social norms when you can’t be kicked
out for bad behavior? How do you determine authority when the community is
spread across hundreds of thousands of sites? In short, what happens when you
treat the entire web as a community?
At Technorati, we’re spearheading many efforts to address
this opportunity. Through microformats, pings, tags, search, and a lot of
optimism, we’re working to enable a web of relationships that’s more in the
grain of the great decentralized DIY web. As a designer of traditional
community spaces, I’m most interested in seeing how the methods traditionally
used to engender community on a single site evolve when the community spans a
multitude of sites.
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